


The Brain

by cordite



Series: Anatomy [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drug Addiction, M/M, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-08
Updated: 2012-03-08
Packaged: 2017-11-01 16:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordite/pseuds/cordite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock knew all about brains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Brain

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Vivi who continues to be fantastic.

Before…

Sherlock knew all about brains. Knew from an early age that his was different, special, not the mundane way that other children were special with their mummies and daddies cooing over how bright they were for managing to read a sentence from a primer about a frisky cat and a dozy dog and wasn’t it lovely how well they did it at just the age of four? He was special to a third standard deviation from these children (Mycroft was only a second standard deviation, practically an imbecile if a perceptive and conniving one), and even at their age he knew what it meant. It meant being cleverer than Mr Wilkins who came five days a week and every second Sunday and visiting Dr Cooper and being asked questions that were, frankly, far beneath him, and making up answers out of sheer boredom. (There was no problem with his memory—the photograph was of a man fishing at a lake with his dog, but where was the fun in that?) He knew his specialness meant diagnosis in ink as if it had been tattooed directly across his skin, seeped into every last pore until it consumed him, until he came to believe it too, until it dripped out of him with every fresh scrape or bloody nose he carried home as a badge of his uniqueness. Isolation as a means of negative reinforcement, operational conditioning. Alone was what he had. 

He could name all the parts. Not the obvious ones. (Though he could name those too, could, if asked, pick his own brain out in a crowd, like a criminal line up in formaldehyde jars, spot the combination of grey and white matter, cerebrum, cerebellum, and medulla, frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes, and why couldn’t anyone else tell just from the over-developed Wierneke and Broca areas, the depth and shape of the central sulcus, the unusually large corpus collosum? Could they not tell, if they placed a slide of their own tissue under a microscope, that it was theirs from the shape of the neurons alone?) He knew the important parts of the brain, the mind, the palace, the details on the decomposition of corpses that he left in the eastern battlement and in the throne room, Schoenberg’s Concerto, which most certainly did not require a sixth finger. He knew the constant ticking that was clocklike and incessant and how nothing escaped his notice, even peripherally and the maddening din of the world that pressed and pressed and _pressed_ its way inside his head. (A common misconception that the cranium was all one bone. It was many and they had fissures, and put enough pressure on the inside of them and they could split apart just like anything else. Burst at the seams, as it were.) He knew too how it felt to turn the burners down, flames on low and gas filling the metaphorical kitchen, now awash with that magnificent 7% solution, then the slow slipping slide, senses shuttering down like an iris into the single pin prick of his existence, chemistry and electricity made living. 

The gasping, choking, nerves on fire reawakening, life left, now returning to every limb, to every cell, every atom, he knew this almost as well. Learned to tolerate ‘clean’, replace his earlier solution with new ones, different ones, the ends of puzzles. And still he was alone. 

 

During…

The most important thing he comes to learn during is the practical application for the mirroring phenomenon. 

Place a man in a room with a person he’s never met: head bent over a microscope, only passingly interested at first, observe, pending filing in the library of the palace (don’t need to store someone who won’t matter later). Set of the jaw, fall of the clothing, grip on the cane, colour of the hair and skin (only to the wrist), gentle hands (scratch the last, careful perhaps, discard gentle until further notice). The first man notices much about the second, but the same cannot be said about the reverse. Now place the same two men in one apartment, one mad flat in London, let each man fill the spaces left by loneliness in the other. Observe them later at a crime scene leaving no gaps between them, logical or physical, no room for anyone else when they’re together. A completion? A whole? No. Pathetic. Leave the sentiment to the weak. But it’s awfully funny how it takes no more than three days for two perfect strangers to be come partners, to form concentric circles round one another as if they’d been at it all along.

He wonders what the fMRI of this relationship would look like; would each image show an exact reflection of the other? Or if you cracked open their skulls to see inside, would you see a perfect symmetry, right for left, left for right, heart for head and head for heart? Would you be able to see all the times the first man bruised a rib and the second held his own in sympathy? Would you see the instances when the second man sighed in frustration and the first man copied just a second later, a second too late to abort the action, something else beating out reason in the rat maze of his brain? 

 

After…

That last piece, the something else, the something beyond reason, that’s what made it all necessary. The deception, the plunge, looking out from eyes like windows (a prisoner locked inside the palace), and unable to cry out, to lift a hand of comfort as he watched, _Jesus, no_ , and felt the pig’s blood, hot and wet, smearing down his scalp, his face, collecting into his scarf, spreading out beneath him on the puddley pavement, _let me through, he’s my friend_ , and he wished he really were dead. It would make things so much easier. 

Three years was much longer than he thought. It was not thirty-six months, nor was it one hundred fifty-six weeks, or one thousand five hundred ninety-five days. It was expanding gaps between synapses and thoughts left unfinished. It was single-minded, half-focus and leaving the rest to muscle memory and anger. It was cold and steely hatred, the kind that tries to fill the void but only makes it that much wider. And when it was finished, he was left with his old standby. Alone. The thing he’s always had.

Except now he knew better. He knew better as he climbed through a downstairs window and noiselessly waited on his old chair (not touched since he left—there’s a pang at this), felt it in the way his brain seemed to start up like a generator when he heard the uneven footfalls on the stairs.

He breathed the word like a sigh of relief.

“John.”


End file.
